Stranded in Arcady Part 14

Bright and early the next morning they tried the spruce-gum experiment.

Prime found that he could have plenty of it for the gathering, and when they had a sufficient quant.i.ty they melted it in one of the empty vegetable tins and used it as a glue with which to make the patch adhere. The result was not entirely satisfactory. The melted gum hardened quickly, but it became so brittle that a touch would loosen it.

"This is where we set up a laboratory for original research," Lucetta said, laughing. "I wonder if some more cooking would do it any good."

"'The ruling pa.s.sion strong in death,'" Prime quoted with good-natured sarcasm. "You are a born cook. Let's try it."

They tried it and merely succeeded in making the product still more brittle. They then tried adding a little grease from the fat pork to make it more flexible, and that ruined it completely.

"Two civilized brains, college-trained to a piano-polish finish, and not a single workable idea between them," Prime derided. "It's humiliating--disgusting!"

"The brains are still available," a.s.serted the undaunted one. "Go and find some pine pitch and we'll mix it with the spruce."

This experiment promised better success. A gluey mixture resulted that stuck, not only to the canoe body and the patch, but to their fingers and to everything it touched. Inventing still further, they contrived a rude clamp to hold the patch in place while it was drying, if by good hap the glue would consent to dry at all; and with the new paddles whittled and sc.r.a.ped into shape, there was nothing to do but to wait upon the drying process.

Prime spent the afternoon fishing, with the tackle found in one of the gun-cases, and was lucky enough to acc.u.mulate a n.o.ble string of trout.

Lucetta would not say what she was going to do, merely hinting that Prime's absence until supper-time would be a boon. Only the buzzard swinging in slow circles overhead could have told tales of the doing after the young woman had obtained her meed of solitude in the little glade, and possibly the buzzard had seen a sufficient number of blanketed women washing clothes at a river brink not to be unduly stirred at the sight.

Later, Prime came in to exhibit his string of fish with true sportsman's pride, and again they feasted royally, forgetting their late tribulations, and looking forward half-regretfully to a resumption of their journey on the morrow.

"It is astonishing how rapidly one can revert to the cave-man type," was Prime's phrasing of the regret. "I have been a person of pavements and cement walks all my life, as I suppose you have--of the paved streets and all that they stand for. Yet I shall go back to them with something like reluctance. Shan't you?"

She did not reply to the direct question.

"You speak as if you had some a.s.surance that we are approaching the pavements. Have you?"

"A bare hint. I fished along the river for about a mile down-stream, spying out the land--or the water--as I went, for future reference. We can't claim this region by the right of discovery. Somebody has been here before us."

"You didn't find a house?" she ventured.

"Oh, no; nothing like that. But I did find the stump of a tree, and the tree had been felled with an axe. It wasn't recently; the stump was old and moss-grown. But it was axe work just the same."

She laughed softly.

"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry, Donald; for myself, I mean.

Of course, you want to get back to your work."

"Do I?" he inquired. "I suppose I ought to want to. I left a book half finished in my New York attic."

"How could you do that? I should think such work would be ruined by having a vacation come along and cut it in two."

"I was sick of it," he confessed frankly. "It was another pen picture of the artificialities, and I shall never finish it now. I'll write a better one."

"Staging it in a Canadian forest?"

"Staging it among the realities, at least. And there shall be a real woman this time."

In his new character of cousin-in-authority, Prime sent Lucetta early to bed to catch up on her arrears of sleep. After she had disappeared behind the curtains of the small shelter-tent, he sat for a long time before the fire smoking the rank tobacco and letting his thoughts rove at will through the mazes of the strange adventure which had befallen him and this distant cousin, of whose very existence he had been ignorant.

More and more the mazes perplexed him, and the coincidences, if they were coincidences, began to verge upon the fantastic or the miraculous.

Was it by accident or design that they had both chanced to be in Quebec at the same time? If the plot were of Grider's concocting, did the barbarian know of the cousinship beforehand? Prime was charitable enough to hope that he did. It made the brutal joke--if it were a joke--a little less criminal to suppose that Grider knew of the relationship.

Still, it was all vastly incredible on any joking hypothesis. Taking the most lenient view of it--that Grider had pre-arranged the a.s.sault upon their liberty and had hired the two half-breeds to pick them up and convoy them out of the wilderness--it was unbelievable that the barbarous one, with all of his known disregard for the common humanities where his Homeric sense of humor was involved, would have turned them over to the tender mercies of two semi-savages whose character had been sufficiently demonstrated by the manner of their death.

"It simply _can't_ have been Watson Grider," Prime mused over his sixth cigarette--he was rolling them now in the label paper of the vegetable tins, frugally soaked off and saved. "If it had been his joke, he wouldn't have left it up in the air; he would have followed along to get the good of it. But if it isn't Grider, who is it, and what is it all about?"

The riddle always worked around thus to the same tormenting question, with no hint of an answer; and, as many times before, Prime was obliged to leave it hanging, like Mohammed's coffin, between heaven and earth.

But when he renewed the fire and rolled himself in his blankets for the night, he was still casting about for some means of bringing it to earth.

Figuring it out afterward, he was certain that he could not have been asleep for more than an hour or two before he was awakened, with the echo of a noise like volley-firing of some sort still ringing in his ears. His first impulse was to spring up, but the second, which was the one he obeyed, was more in keeping with the new character development.

Deftly freeing himself from the blanket wrappings, he reached over to make sure that one of the guns could be caught up quickly, and lay quiet.

For some little time nothing happened, and the night silence of the forest was undisturbed. Just as he was beginning to think that it had been the mosquitoes, and not a noise, which had awakened him, and was about to get up and renew the smudge which he had made to windward before turning in, he heard cautious footsteps as of some one approaching from the direction of the river.

The measured tread a.s.sured him that the footfalls were human, and his hold tightened mechanically upon the grip of the gun-stock. By this time he was thinking quite clearly, and he told himself that the militant precaution was doubtless unnecessary; that there was little chance that the approaching intruder--any intruder who would be attracted by the light of the camp-fire--would be unfriendly. Yet it was the part of prudence to be prepared.

After a moment or two he was able to note that the approaching footsteps were growing more cautious. At this he rolled over by imperceptible inchings to face toward the river, drawing the gun with him. It was useless to try to penetrate the black shadows of the background. The fire had died down to a ma.s.s of glowing embers, its bedtime replenishing of dried wood blazing up fitfully only now and then to illumine a slightly wider circle. Prime saw nothing, and, for a time after the footfalls ceased, heard nothing. But the next manifestation was startling enough. At a moment when he was beginning to wonder if his imagination had been playing tricks on him, he heard a curious ripping sound coming, this time, from behind the inverted canoe.

Silently he rose to his knees with the rifle held low. For shelter, in case of a shower, the provisions had been placed under the inverted birch-bark, and he decided instantly that the intruder was trying to steal them. Not wishing to alarm Lucetta, he got upon his feet and walked toward the canoe, meaning to put the man behind it between himself and the firelight.

The manoeuvre was never completed. Before he had taken half a dozen steps a blinding flashlight was turned upon him from behind the canoe, and it stopped him as suddenly as if the dazzling radiance had been a volley from a machine-gun. But the stopping shock was only momentary.

Dashing forward around the end of the canoe, he had a glimpse of a big-bodied man in a golf cap and sweater crashing his way through the undergrowth toward the river, and promptly gave chase.

"Grider!--Watson!" he called, but there was no reply. The intruder, as he ran, had the benefit of his flashlight; Prime could see the momentary gleams as the runner took a diagonal course which would bring him out a hundred yards down-stream from a point directly opposite the camp-fire.

Prime collided with a tree, stumbled and fell, and sprang up to call again. The retreating footfalls were no longer audible, but now there was another cacophony of noise--the sputtering exhausts of a motor-boat--and Prime reached the river-bank in time to see the dark shape of the power-driven craft losing itself in the starlight in its swift rush down the river.

In the first flush of his rage at what figured as a second heartless desertion, Prime was strongly tempted to open fire on the retreating motor-boat and its occupant. This was purely a cave-man prompting, and before it could translate itself into action the opportunity was gone.

When the motor-boat had disappeared, losing itself to sight and sound, the breathless pursuer went back to his blankets, swearing gloomily at the spiteful chance which had opened the door of misfortune by making him a college cla.s.smate of one Watson Grider.

XIV

OF THE NAME OF BANDISH

THE next morning Prime waited until after breakfast before telling Lucetta about the visit of the intruder, the postponement basing itself upon a very natural disinclination to re-align himself, even constructively, with such a brutal humorist as Watson Grider. Indeed, when he told the story, he omitted to mention the barbarian's name; would never have mentioned it if Lucetta had not pushed him into a corner.

"You say you saw the man; was it a stranger, or some one you knew?" she questioned.

"I couldn't be sure," Prime evaded. "The fire wasn't burning very brightly, and he had just blinded me with his flashlight."

The gray eyes were regarding him calmly.

"It is to be hoped, Cousin Donald, that you will never have to fib yourself out of a real difficulty. You prevaricate so clumsily, you know."

"I wasn't lying," he protested; "really, you know, I couldn't be sure."